Archive for August, 2008
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
Big Brother was an Amateur
In his fantastic new book, Reinventing Collapse, Dmitry Orlov observes that the US overclass now enjoys “an arrangement over which Soviet central planners would surely have salivated profusely.”
Consider Quividi, the new marketing service that is placing video cameras inside the proliferating legion of video-screen being deployed to beam corporate advertising into stores, airports, bus stations, restaurants, etc., etc. etc.
Quividi describes itself to its prospective employers thusly:
With Quividi’s solution, however, the days of blind advertising are over: VidiReports and VidiCenter are the ultimate way to measure and to add value to public space media.
By deploying an inexpensive video sensor in the vicinity of the monitored media and by taking advantage of the extra, unused computing power of standard signage players, Quividi’s software provides you with key metrics on your signage installation:* An estimation of the opportunity to see; (OTS)
* A precise count of actual viewers;
* Various aggregate inidces on viewership such as dwell time, attention time, “face minutes”;
* Precise viewership demographics;
* Precise correlation between viewership and content, via the inclusion of playlists in VidiCenter.
If you doubt the Orwellian nature of the endeavor, look here.
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
The Greatest Degeneration
Quiz Question:
Economically speaking, how did the United States get itself out of the Great Depression of the 1930s?
Hint #1: This solution also led to the only time in modern corporate-American history when there was full employment, a job for everybody who wanted one…
Hint #2: It also had to do with fighting fascism in a big war…
Answer: massive new government taxes and expenditures.
Nonetheless, here is one of the Neo-Gumby legions who can’t (or won’t, depending on where you place him between the “Dumb” and “Dishonest” poles of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Presidential Capacities Scale™)* correctly answer this utterly basic, sixth-grade-level civics question:
Why do I say this? Check out this howler among howlers.
And, by the way, this multifaceted mega-stinker also serves as a pretty good indicator of exactly how dead the Democratic Party is. The Republican demagogues who make these blatant promotions of childish ignorance about elementary facts know full well that Barack Obama is distinctly NOT proposing large new tax-and-spend programs. That, of course, doesn’t stop them from baiting him on the topic.
They also know that they won’t get a rebuttal — despite the scale of their error and idiocy — from Obama and the rest of the pack of social-climbing creeps who market themselves as “the opposition.” As always, the Dembots are too busy collecting PAC money, planning new wars, and explaining all the things the poor, helpless government “can’t” do here at home.
Who needs a Memory Hole when you have corporate capitalism? Market totalitarianism is an auto-shredder.
___________
*My own scale placements: (0 = total moronitude; 100 = total dishonesty/salesmanship)
Reagan: 5
Bush II: 8 (would be a 4, but for his ability to pass himself off as a Christian — admittedly not very hard, but still…)
Clinton: 89
Bush I: 75
McCain: 40
Carter: 39
Nixon: 95
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
The Obvious (Forbidden) Answer
Yesterday, I ridiculed Obama’s ridiculous promise to waste $4 billion “helping” the mass-murdering automotive corporations.
If that’s such a bad idea, then what’s a better one?
Well, it sure ain’t rocket science:
For starters, moving toward better cars is already happening. Why in the world should the public have to pay for that, even at Obama’s pathetically paltry level?
What we need instead is to build ourselves modern intra- and inter-city railroads, and make all public transit free.
As to the money, nobody batted an eye about running the Iraq Invasion via deficit financing, and that criminality doesn’t come close to providing the macro-economic stimulus that building real railroads and funding free public transport would. Whatever deficits would be required up front would probably be gone within a few years, as a sea of good new jobs for workers added new paychecks and tax revenues.
Of course, none of this is going to happen, barring a massive democratic uprising. Corporate capitalism cannot survive without cars-first transportation in the USA. Hence, more roadkill is the only option that will be “on the table.”
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
The Suppressed Basics of Cars & Capitalism
On Stop Me Before I Vote Again, Michael J. Smith noted how one now has to subscribe to leftist blogs and mailing lists to obtain the most elementary facts about the state of the nation and the world.
In this case, the topic was the simultaneously picayune and deeply rotten nature of Barack Obama’s (is “Obama” Bantu for “Reagan”?) pledge to further subsidize the automobile industry.
Here’s what I wrote as a comment over at SMBIVA:
Well, corporate capitalism runs by six industrial complexes, plus government spending to boost and grease it all.
The complexes are:
Financial-Industrial
Medical-Industrial
Entertainment-Industrial
Military-Industrial
Household-Industrial
Automotive-Industrial
Remove any one of these six legs, and the money-changers’ table tips over.
The auto-industrial complex, however, is the one that is in big immediate trouble, due to the inherent pipe-dream of using two tons of materials to transport individuals to and fro every day of the year.
Finance will always renew itself, thanks to the basic structure of income distribution, and is also set up to expect some down times.
Medical ain’t going nowhere.
Military ain’t going nowhere.
Household (being food-clothing-shelter) certainly ain’t going nowhere, and is, size-wise, largely a shadow of the automotive complex. The car gives you the suburb, which sells everybody washers and dryers to replace the shared laundromat room, etc.
The car is the linchpin of the system, and, hence, it is non-negotiable, from the overclass (read: mainstream + confused/cowed/captive “alternative”) perspective.
Posted by Michael Dawson | August 6, 2008 1:44 PM
Posted on August 6, 2008 13:44
Michael Dawson:
P.S. re the numbers:
If you tote up vehicle purchases, repairs, fuel, insurance, parking, parts/tires, and road construction/maintenance, the yearly US expenditure on automobiles easily tops a trillion dollars. These days, it’s probably >1.5 trillion…
So, the Neo-Gipper is talking about pumping in something like one-third-of-one-percent of the overall endeavor.
Such is the fruit yielded by the tree of Klintonism and its imported “balanced budget” rootstock.
And P.P.S.
Where the fuck is all the new electricity for these supposedly workable electric vehicles going to come from? Wind and solar are break-even propositions, at best, in EROEI terms, and using nukes or coal to make the juice would last about a decade before it would hit the self-same supply limits now looming for petroleum.
I know it’s been said before, ala Chicken Little, but here we go again: Only a mass green-socialist-public enterprise uprising against the system will solve this coming crisis…
Monday, August 4th, 2008
Tax Increases Anybody?
Monday, August 4th, 2008
Junk Mail on Steroids
Big business marketing and advertising are much more Pavlovian and much less magical and postmodern than most critics have claimed.
If you doubt this, consider how television advertising, the endeavor that funds and delimits almost all the program “content” on US television, actually functions. Here is long-time marketing consultant Erwin Ephron describing it:
For example, a shampoo brand buys daytime TV at $10.00 for a thousand 30-second exposures.
Since each incremental unit of shampoo sold makes a $2.00 contribution to profit (i.e. wholesale price minus marginal cost), then fewer than five incremental sales can cover the cost of the advertising.
And also the cost of talking to 994 other potential customers who may be in the market next week!
Micro-marketers who argue that exposures not resulting in a sale are wasted, are as wrong-headed as people who argue that advertising shouldn’t be expected to sell at all. Some exposures sell, but all exposures build broad market awareness, shift attitudes and help create the brand value, which is the foundation for the next sale. These are the hard and soft effects of TV advertising.
The economics of network television for a super-upscale brand like Mercedes are even more remarkable. For Mercedes, one incremental sale can pay the costs of network messages to a million men and women.
True, most of them will never buy the car, but those messages are not wasted, either. They help to create the broad-market perception that Mercedes is special, which makes owning a Mercedes one so attractive to the small group of consumers who have the money.
For super-upscale products, value to the purchaser is often in the eye of all those millions of non-purchasers.
In other words, considered from the point of view of its sponsors, television is junk mail on steroids.
And we’ve long since surrendered our civil society to this inherently discombobulating and addictive force.
This great surrender, of course, remains completely “off the table” of mainstream politics and media coverage, despite its extreme threat to us, our democracy, and the world our rampaging sponsoring class is still bullying.
